At Brooklyn Invitational, Disrupting Notions of Motorcycle Culture

A send-off to a long, hot summer was orchestrated on Sept. 22, as thousands of motorcyclists descended on the waterfront of North Williamsburg for the Brooklyn Invitational Custom Motorcycle Show. The attendance and variety of motorcycle culture on view further cemented the position of the show, in its fourth year, as among the most important in North America.

But this was no Sturgis or Laconia, those rallies given over to ponytails and patch-covered leather vests. The aesthetic of the Brooklyn Invitational is largely dictated by John Copeland, a fine arts painter; Keino Sasaki, owner of Keino Cycles, a custom bike shop in Brooklyn; and Jeffrey Schad, a professional photographer.

Mr. Copeland said the three started the event in 2008 because there “was nothing happening on the East Coast, let alone New York City,” that showcased the kinds of design, style and attitude embraced by them and the builders they admired.

“We just were like, ‘Why don’t we do it like a gallery show, where it’s like, look, this is the people that we respect, the work that we think is good, and do it in a different context,'” Mr. Copeland said.

Photo

The scene outside Root on Saturday.Credit Austin Considine

The Invitational featured about two dozen builders invited from all over the country. California-based builders on hand included David Freston of Chopper Dave’s Casting Company in Long Beach; Max Schaaf of 4Q Conditioning in Oakland; and Scott Jones of Noise Cycles in Santa Ana, whose impossibly detailed black and gold 1959 pan-shovelhead Harley-Davidson was a crowd favorite.

The scope of the event has grown since its start at an indoor skate park in Greenpoint. Its first year, which featured 12 bikes, drew roughly 2,000 people, Mr. Copeland said. By 2011, attendance swelled to more than 5,000, and in a phone interview on Monday, Mr. Copeland estimated the crowd on Saturday at 10,000. What little money the event makes — entry is free — goes toward producing the next year’s Invitational.

“Everybody in here is doing this because they love it and it’s part of their heart and soul,” he added. “They don’t have a choice. They’re going to do this, or they’re going to do nothing else.”

Held at Root, an expansive photo studio near the waterfront in North Williamsburg, the Invitational is a forum for motorcycle culture of a different stripe. Local bands Endless Boogie and Psychic Limb provided music, and Asahi peddled $3 cans of beer late into the night, without a trace of ZZ Top or Budweiser to be found.

But the centerpiece, unequivocally, was the bikes.

“This event is different than everything else,” said Mr. Freston of Chopper Dave’s, a repeat guest. His 1947 green and cream knucklehead Harley on display was a masterwork of postwar curves and latter-day minimalism.

“They’ve managed to make a bike event that somehow isn’t a bike event,” he added. “It’s an art deal, but they’ve somehow crossed the two in a way that’s never been done before that works.”

Given its location just a few blocks from Bedford Avenue, the area’s main drag and a catwalk for New York’s postmillennial creatives, the hybrid is not surprising. The show’s tattooed, neatly coiffed attendees would have looked as comfortable in the dive bars and art studios of Bushwick as at a motorcycle show. The women attendees, unlike those at some other bike shows, were fully clothed.

Inside the crisp, white-walled gallery were pristine, hand-customized motorcycles surrounded by photographic prints. For all the fun inspired by bikes, beer and bands, the mood inside was also reverential. Builders discussed their craft before awed admirers, who crouched to get closer views and to snap photos on their mobile phones.

Outside, the cracked streets and sidewalks of the old waterfront, still wild and industrial, were thronged with bikers and their hundreds of bikes, some of which rivaled the machines inside for meticulousness and bravura.

“Three-quarters of this show is happening out on the street right now,” Jeff Wright, from Church of Choppers, in Des Moines, said. Mr. Wright, who also runs a blog of the same name, said he spent hundreds of hours building his bike: a red, white and blue, extended-fork 1979 shovelhead Harley that was a model of simple chopper elegance.

He appreciated the show because he was “sick and tired” of events in what he described as the “California” mold. The grittiness of the waterfront, with the sun setting behind Manhattan, was a perfect backdrop for a scrappy motorcycle show.

“That artwork that’s out there, it’s not flowers and green and palm trees,” he said.

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